Basin vs Tally
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentBasin compared with Tally
Different jobs entirely. Tally builds and hosts the form for you, free and unmetered, with logic, payments, and uploads included, from a bootstrapped Belgian company with EU hosting. Basin renders nothing and assumes you wrote the form yourself, then handles spam, files, notification, and routing better than any builder does. If you want a form without writing one, Tally wins outright. If the form is part of your own codebase, Tally is not an option and Basin is the strongest backend here.
Choose Basin if
Developers, agencies, and small technical teams running their own forms who need serious spam control, reliable notification delivery, large file handling with virus scanning, and a backend whose behaviour at the volume cap is published rather than guessed at.
Choose Tally if
Startups, indie makers, and small marketing teams that need real forms (logic, calculations, payments, file uploads) without a per-response meter, and who are comfortable analyzing responses in Notion, Sheets, or Airtable rather than inside the form tool.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Basin | Tally |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $12.50 per month billed yearly (Starter) (free plan available) | EUR 20/mo (Pro, billed monthly; yearly billing gives 2 months free) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium with five self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions and storage, with published per-thousand overage rather than a hard cap; prices shown are the yearly-billed monthly equivalents. | Flat per-workspace subscription with an unlimited free tier; paid plans unlock branding removal, custom domains, workspaces, and governance features rather than higher response quotas. Seats are not charged separately. |
| Free plan | Free covers 1 form, 50 submissions a month, 100MB of storage, basic spam protection, Zapier, and AJAX support, with submissions retained for only 30 days. | Unlimited forms and unlimited submissions, plus conditional logic, calculations, answer piping, file uploads (10 MB per file), signatures, Stripe payments, password protection, submission limits and close dates, 45+ languages, and integrations with Notion, Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, Make, and webhooks. Subject to published fair-usage guidelines. |
| Free trial | No separate trial; the free plan is the evaluation path | No separate trial; the free plan is permanent and unlimited on submissions |
| Best for | Developers, agencies, and small technical teams running their own forms who need serious spam control, reliable notification delivery, large file handling with virus scanning, and a backend whose behaviour at the volume cap is published rather than guessed at. | Startups, indie makers, and small marketing teams that need real forms (logic, calculations, payments, file uploads) without a per-response meter, and who are comfortable analyzing responses in Notion, Sheets, or Airtable rather than inside the form tool. |
| Setup time | Ten to fifteen minutes for a working endpoint, plus another half hour if you are configuring the spam stack properly and connecting custom SMTP. | Minutes. A working form with logic and an integration is a 15-minute job, and there is no account requirement for respondents, no domain setup, and no data model to design first. |
| Learning curve | Low for the endpoint and moderate for the spam configuration, which has enough options that it rewards a deliberate pass rather than accepting defaults. Form Studio is trivial if you use it. | The lowest in the category for anyone who has used Notion. The only non-obvious parts are the calculator (variables are configured per block) and hidden fields, both of which the help docs cover in a page each. |
| Platforms | HTTP POST endpoint usable from any framework, Plain HTML forms, BasinJS for JavaScript frameworks, Form Studio drag-and-drop builder, Static sites and single-page applications via AJAX | Web app, Embeds (inline, popup, full page), Custom domains on paid tiers |
| Compliance | GDPR tooling including automatic data receipts and easy deletion, Configurable data retention, Cloudflare DDoS protection and WAF integration, No published HIPAA business associate agreement, No published accessibility conformance statement | GDPR compliant, built and hosted in the EU (Belgium-based company), Data encrypted in transit and at rest, No cookie tracking on respondent-facing forms |
| Founded | 2017 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | British Columbia, Canada | Belgium (Tally BV, EU-hosted) |
| Ownership | Owned by Moonshot Ventures, Inc. | Bootstrapped |
Strengths and limitations
Basin
Strengths
- The deepest spam stack in this part of the category: three CAPTCHA engines plus duplicate, country, language, burner-email, honeypot, domain, and WAF filtering, with advanced filtering on Pro.
- A published overage rate of $5.25 per thousand submissions, roughly half a cent each, with the form continuing to work rather than pausing.
- File uploads to 50GB with virus scanning and signed URLs, which is far beyond what any hosted form builder will accept.
- HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with event logs, so receiving endpoints can verify authenticity and failures are debuggable.
Limitations
- The free plan drops submissions after thirty days, which is a quiet way to lose data if nobody reads the retention line.
- Starter at $12.50 includes zero collaborators and one project, so it is genuinely single-developer and most teams have to start at Growth.
- Submission allowances are low relative to price at the bottom: 250 a month on Starter against Formcarry's 500 for $5.
- No HIPAA business associate agreement and no published data residency region, which matters for healthcare and for EU-only requirements where Forminit states AWS Ireland.
Tally
Strengths
- Genuinely unlimited free tier: unlimited forms and submissions with logic, calculations, payments, file uploads, and signatures included, not withheld as paid bait.
- The document-style editor is the fastest way to build a form of any tool in this category, especially for teams already fluent in Notion.
- Flat workspace pricing with unlimited collaborators, so team growth does not create a bill the way per-seat tools do.
- EU-built and EU-hosted with no respondent cookie tracking, which clears European privacy reviews without a negotiation.
Limitations
- Analytics are minimal: visits, completion, and drop-off, with the useful historical depth reserved for Pro. Serious response analysis happens elsewhere.
- No in-app or website-behavior survey targeting at all, so product teams wanting NPS or in-product feedback need a second tool.
- The free plan's limits are governed by fair-usage language rather than a published number, which is fine for most teams and unnerving for anyone planning very high volume.
- Compliance posture is thinner than rivals: GDPR and EU hosting are documented, but there is no advertised SOC 2 Type II certification of the kind Fillout and Formbricks publish.
Pricing compared
Basin
Freemium with five self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions and storage, with published per-thousand overage rather than a hard cap; prices shown are the yearly-billed monthly equivalents.
- Free$0
- Starter$12.50
- Growth$24.17
- Pro$30.62
- Agency$81.25
At 500 submissions a month the cheapest route is Starter at $12.50 plus roughly $1.31 of overage, or Growth at $24.17 if you want retention and collaborators, which most people will. At 5,000 a month Pro costs $30.62 billed yearly, or about $367 a year, against Formcarry's $960 and Forminit's $228. That places Basin in the middle on headline price and comfortably first on what you get for it: three CAPTCHA engines, seven or eight spam filters, virus scanning, 50GB uploads, signed webhooks, custom SMTP, and an overage rate that keeps the form alive. If you are choosing a backend on capability per dollar rather than on the cheapest possible line item, Basin is the pick.
Tally
Flat per-workspace subscription with an unlimited free tier; paid plans unlock branding removal, custom domains, workspaces, and governance features rather than higher response quotas. Seats are not charged separately.
- FreeEUR 0
- ProEUR 20
- BusinessEUR 65
On capability per dollar Tally is close to unbeatable, because for a large share of teams the correct answer is zero dollars. The paid tier is honest about what it sells: branding, domain, team workspaces, and partial submissions, not access to features you already needed. At 20 euros a month flat for unlimited collaborators and unlimited responses, Pro undercuts Fillout's Business tier by a factor of three and Paperform's Pro tier by more than half, and it does so without a submission meter running in the background. The catch is scope, not price: if you need in-app surveys, a real database behind the form, or a SOC 2 report, the cheapness is irrelevant because Tally does not do those things.
Editorial verdict on each
Basin
Basin is the most serious form backend a small company can buy, and the reason is that it treats the two things that actually break in production, spam and email delivery, as product areas rather than checkboxes. Three CAPTCHA engines, seven or eight independent filters, virus scanning, 50GB uploads, HMAC-signed webhooks, custom SMTP, and data receipt emails in fifteen languages is a genuinely deep stack for around $30 a month. Above all it publishes its overage rate at roughly half a cent a submission and keeps the form working, which is the single most important thing a backend can promise. Buy it if you run forms across many sites, if spam or attachments are real problems, or if you want the failure mode written down. Do not buy the free plan expecting to keep your data, since it is dropped after thirty days, and do not buy Basin at all if you need someone else to build the form.
Read the full Basin profileTally
Best ValueTally is the default recommendation for any startup that needs forms and has not already committed to something else. The free tier is not a trial in disguise: unlimited submissions with logic, calculations, payments, and file uploads included is a real product, and the 20-euro Pro plan buys branding, a domain, and a shared workspace rather than access to features you were already using. The limits are honest ones: no in-app survey targeting, thin analytics, no public API, and no SOC 2 report. If your form is a front end for an operational process, buy Fillout; if your survey has to fire inside your product, buy Formbricks. For everything else, Tally is the tool you should try first and will probably never leave.
Read the full Tally profileBasin profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Tally last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.